On Thursday, poet Anne Waldman treated audience members in the McCormack Family Theater to a recitation of her distinctive experimental poetry. Hosted by the Department of Literary Arts, the event is the latest installment in the “Writers on Writing” reading series.
Introduced as an “activist poet at the edge of poetic possibility,” Waldman has authored more than 60 books throughout her career, including her acclaimed 1974 poem collection “Fast Speaking Woman.” Waldman is renowned for her multidisciplinary collaborations with prominent artistic figures such as musician Bob Dylan, poet Allen Ginsberg and singer-songwriter Patti Smith.
A recipient of an American Book Awards Lifetime Achievement Award, a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship and the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award, Waldman recently made her way to College Hill to serve as last week’s poet-in-residence at the Department of Literary Arts.
Waldman was joined by musician Andrew Whiteman and singer-songwriter Ariel Engle, a pair whose avant-garde electronic music provided an ambient backdrop to Waldman’s spoken word poetry.
Just a few seconds after walking up to the podium, Waldman began a reading of one of her pieces, offering sweeping imagery of relevant political issues such as immigration enforcement and automated camera surveillance. The performance opened without any instrumentation, and Waldman’s voice gripped the small dark room as she repeated the poem’s harrowing motif: “Astral omens these days.”
Joined by Whiteman and Engle, Waldman also performed “Rat-tat-tat-tat” which set the mood for the remainder of the event with the combination of experimental music and spoken word. Whiteman’s pulsating electronic instrumentals set the background to Waldman’s poem recitation and Engle’s intermittent vocal flourishes.
The trio’s next composition included a medley of two different pieces, “Tears Streak the Reddest Rouge” and “Kali is a Goddess.” During the medley, the ethereal sonic ambience of Whiteman and Engle’s musical accompaniment perfectly echoed the themes of rage and renewal in Waldman’s verse.
“Angry as in one wanting to magnetize and destroy, oh Kali, a psychological twist,” Waldman recited.
Before the trio took questions from the audience, Engle performed a musicalized version of the 13th poem in the late poet Alice Notley’s collection “In the Pines.” Engle’s lighter voice and the song’s quasi-pop structure provided a curious but welcome departure from Waldman’s performance style.
During the Q&A, Waldman spoke of moments of ceremony that bookend people’s lives, from the moments of celebrations she saw in her travels to India and Indonesia to ceremonies that “go over a space of time” in Bali. Poetry can also serve as an “antidote” and a “shield,” Waldman said.
“This is such an exciting time because there’s some hope and possibility in bringing down the monster and that sort of thing, the tyrant,” Waldman said. “It’s not going to happen overnight. People can get fickle, but I’m very inspired. Especially by the youth of so many people.”
For Anne Clifford-Levy ’30 — who attended the event as part of the first-year seminar LITR 0710: “Writers on Writing Seminar” — Waldman’s performance affirmed her “understanding of the importance of art and how it can make you feel so much.”
Saskia Sommer ’30, one of Clifford-Levy’s classmates, added that the event built upon themes that they had previously discussed in the seminar.
“It was such a life-affirming experience, and a lot of it is what we’ve been talking about in Writers on Writing — of what poetry and art are all about,” Sommer said.
